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To cope with his dread, John Kitzhaber opened his leather-bound journal and began to write.
It was a little past 9 on the morning of Nov. 22, 2011. Gary Haugen had dropped his appeals. A Marion County judge had signed the murderer's death warrant, leaving Kitzhaber, a former emergency room doctor, to decide Haugen's fate. The 49-year-old would soon die by lethal injection if the governor didn't intervene.
Kitzhaber was exhausted, having been unable to sleep the night before, but he needed to call the families of Haugen's victims.
"I know my decision will delay the closure they need and deserve," he wrote.
The son of University of Oregon English professors, Kitzhaber began writing each day in his journal in the early 1970s. The practice helped him organize his thoughts and, on that particular morning, gather his courage.
Kitzhaber first dialed the widow of David Polin, an inmate Haugen beat and stabbed to death in 2003 while already serving a life sentence fo…

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U.S.: Efforts to end death penalty gain steam

After nearly 2 decades of declining use, opponents of the death penalty have begun what they characterize as a sustained legislative and political push to end capital punishment in states across the country.

Voters in California and Nebraska will decide this year whether to end the death penalty.

Legislators appear poised to end capital punishment in states as different as deep-blue Delaware and ruby-red Utah. And public opinion polls show that while a majority of Americans still back executions for those convicted of murder, that majority is shrinking.

"The growing opposition to the death penalty is evident among every demographic group. You see the same type of patterns among all age groups, among all races, among all religions and among every political affiliation," said Robert Dunham, who runs the Death Penalty Information Center, a group that advocates for an end to capital punishment.

At the presidential level, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both support the death penalty. But Trump hasn't discussed the issue in detail, and Clinton at a debate earlier this year suggested she'd be happy if the Supreme Court or states began to eliminate the death penalty. The Democratic platform calls for repealing the death penalty.

At the state level, calls for an end to the death penalty are coming from an unlikely corner of the political spectrum: Conservatives.

Nebraska's legislature, ostensibly nonpartisan but in practice controlled by Republicans, made headlines in 2015 by repealing the death penalty.

Utah's Republican state Senate passed a repeal bill earlier this year, though it died in the state House. In Kentucky, where Republicans only recently gained control of the state Senate, a Senate committee held hearings on a repeal vote, the first such hearing since 1976. Another repeal measure stalled on a tie vote in Montana's legislature, where Republicans are in control.

"You're going to see more conservative states moving toward repeal," said Marc Hyden, a former National Rifle Association staffer who now runs Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty. "The death penalty is dying out."

While 30 states allow capital punishment, the governors of four of those states - Washington, Oregon, Colorado and Pennsylvania - have set a moratorium on executions while they are in office. 20 states do not allow executions.

The number of executions carried out across the country has declined precipitously in recent years. In 2015, states carried out just 28 executions, the lowest number since 1991 and down from a high of 98 in 1999. Through July 15, when Georgia executed a man convicted of murder in 1982, 15 executions had taken place in 2016.

Part of the reason the number of executions have fallen is that states are having a tough time getting the drugs necessary for lethal injections. All thirty states that allow the death penalty use lethal injections as their preferred method of execution. But some of the pharmaceutical companies - mostly based in Europe - that produce those drugs have refused to sell their products to states for use in executions, leading to nationwide shortfalls.

The fact that so few executions are taking place has spurred legislators in at least a few states to rethink capital punishment.

"We started to look at the institution of the death penalty as a broken government system. We had a system that was not being used, that was costing us money," said Colby Coash, the Nebraska state senator who sponsored his state's repeal measure in 2015. "If any other program in history had been this costly or ineffective, we would have gotten rid of it a long time ago."

Death penalty advocates are fighting repeal supporters in a handful of key states. After Nebraska passed its repeal in 2015, over the veto of Gov. Pete Ricketts, advocates forced a voter referendum on the measure onto this year's ballot, aided by $300,000 from the governor and his father, a major Republican donor who founded the online brokerage firm TD Ameritrade.

"There was a real groundswell of anger from different corners of the state about the repeal,' said Chris Peterson, a spokesman for Nebraskans for the Death Penalty. Peterson's group is preparing an ad campaign that highlights those on Nebraska's death row, and the crimes they have committed.

Peterson pointed to a poll conducted for his group earlier this month that showed 58 % of Nebraska voters back keeping the death penalty. Just 30 % favor repealing the legislation.

Repeal backers in Nebraska are touting a study conducted by Ernest Goss, an economist at Creighton University, which found Nebraska spends $14.6 million every year on the death penalty, even though the state has not executed a prisoner since December 1997. Death penalty supporters countered with a study from a state legislative analyst that found the death penalty has no such impact.

The Nebraska vote, Peterson said, appeared as the first in what could become a series of anti-death penalty dominos. But, he said: "We're going to work aggressively and we're optimistic that we're going to set our domino back up."

Death penalty proponents have a chance to bolster capital punishment in 1 state this year: Voters in Oklahoma will face a state question that would specifically declare the death penalty is not cruel or unusual punishment.

There is likely to be at least 1 legislative push to reinstate the death penalty next year: New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) said last week she would make a legislative priority of reinstating the death penalty for those convicted of murdering police officers and children. Martinez cited the murders of 5 police officers in Dallas last month, a police officer in Hatch, N.M., and a Navajo child earlier this year.

"[A] society that fails to adequately protect and defend those who protect all of us is a society that will be undone and unsafe," Martinez said in a statement emailed to The Hill.

Voters in California will decide 2 ballot measures that would lead to polar opposite outcomes: One measure, Proposition 62, would end California's death penalty altogether. The other, Proposition 66, would maintain capital punishment and speed the appeals process.

It was not immediately clear what would happen if both measures pass in November. In other cases, when 2 contradictory ballot measures have passed, courts have tended to side with the measure that won a higher level of support among voters.

A majority of Americans continues to support the death penalty, according to public opinion polls, but that support has dropped. In October, Gallup found 61 % of Americans support the death penalty for a person convicted of murder, down from a high of 80 % in 1994. A Pew Research Center survey conducted last year found 56 % of Americans favor the death penalty, down from a peak of 78 % in 1995.

Source: the hill.com, August 23, 2016

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Organizers of an anti-death penalty coalition say they have delivered over 56,000 petition signatures to New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, urging him to sign a bill to repeal the state’s capital punishment law.
Sununu has vowed to veto the bill, saying he stands with crime victims and members of the law enforcement community.
Before presenting the signatures, the New Hampshire Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty held a news conference Thursday where family members of murder victims spoke in favor of repealing the death penalty.
The bill was passed by the House and Senate.
It is unclear whether they have a two-thirds majority of votes in both chambers, which is needed to override vetoes. Source: The Associated Press, May 17, 2018

⚑ | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.

The high school junior accused of gunning down 10 students and teachers at a Santa Fe school is facing a capital murder charge - but he’ll never face the death penalty, even in Texas.
Though Dimitrios Pagourtzis was charged as an adult and jailed without bond, even if he’s found guilty he can’t be sentenced to death because of a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. And in the Lone Star State, he can’t be sentenced to life without parole as the result of a 2013 law that banned the practice for minors.
“In Texas, after the Supreme Court’s decision, they passed a law that basically says that it’s a life sentence if you’re under 18 at the time of the crime,” said attorney Amanda Marzullo, executive director of Texas Defender Services. “The Court has said that it is cruel and unusual to execute an individual who is under 18 at the time of the offense.”
The Santa Fe High School student admitted to the mass shooting that killed 10 and wounded 10 others early Friday, according to court documents.…

31 years ago, on May 20, 1987, just before midnight, I was sitting in the witness area of the Mississippi Gas Chamber watching someone die in front of me. His name was Edward Earl Johnson.
I am both sad and glad that Edward’s final two weeks, right up to his agonising death, were recorded in Paul Hamann’s extraordinary BBC documentary Fourteen Days in May. Sad, because from time to time I find myself forced to relive that horror, when I watch the film at some public event; glad, because at least Edward’s senseless death has had positive repercussions – the film inspiring many to take up the battle for people in his precarious predicament.
Yet it irks me beyond measure that people who should know better use their position of power to prognosticate that the justice system never executes the innocent. For example, in a case called Kansas v. March, in 2006, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia loudly proclaimed that there is not “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a…

How much does the public have a right to know about how the state of Indiana executes people?
It is a question that, effectively, strikes at the heart of capital punishment. And it's the issue in a 4-year-old case in Marion Circuit Court that started with a public records request by Washington attorney A. Katherine Toomey to the Indiana Department of Corrections (DOC).
"If we win ... the Indiana public will know more about one of the most consequential areas of decision making that the state of Indiana engages in," attorney Peter Racher said in an interview.
The state, however, sees it as contrary to a state law limiting what the public can see pertaining to executions. The law was controversial because of how it passed. After midnight on the final day of the 2017 legislative session, it was added to a budget bill, two pages out of 175.
"The budget is now a death penalty bill," Rep. Matt Pierce, D-Bloomington, said at the time. "There's been no public…

The lawyers fighting the death penalty ordered for a former Northmont High School student want the Ohio Supreme Court to reconsider its affirmation of the sentence and scheduling of the execution.
Austin Myers' lawyers said in a motion filed this morning that they want the state's highest court to overturn the conviction and call a new trial "or in the alternative that his sentence be modified to life without parole."
Myers, 23, is still apparently the 2nd youngest on Ohio's death row 3 1/2 years after being sentenced for the murder of childhood friend Justin Back, 18, of Wayne Twp., Warren County.
Last Thursday, the court affirmed the death penalty for Myers, for the stabbing death of Back at his home outside Waynesville in January 2014.
The execution was scheduled for July 20, 2022 in the decision.
Warren County prosecutor David Fornshell was pleased with the 7-0 ruling by the state's highest court.
"The 7-0 decision is always something you like to se…

Defendant claims firefighters didn't try hard enough to extinguish blaze
The nanny responsible for killing 4 members of a family in an arson appeared in court in eastern China on Thursday to appeal her death sentence.
Mo Huanjing, nanny of the family of Lin Shengbin, pleaded guilty to starting the fire. But she said during the appeal at Zhejiang High People's Court that "the penalty in the original ruling was extremely heavy".
"The tragedy wasn't the result I wanted to see," she added. She said the efforts of firefighters were flawed. And she confessed to her offense during the initial interrogation, which could be regarded as a reason to earn a more lenient sentence.
Wu Pengbin, her lawyer, told China Daily that some firefighters and employees of the property management department of Lin's apartment attended the hearing as witnesses at his urging.
"I wanted them to show what they were doing at the time to the court, as I, with my client, thoug…

(CNN) - An Australian woman has been sentenced to death by hanging after a Malaysian court overturned an earlier acquittal of drug smuggling charges.
According to CNN affiliate Sky News, a three-judge panel unanimously threw out the previous ruling in 54-year-old Maria Elvira Pinto Exposto's case.
The grandmother and mother of four was arrested in December 2014 while transiting through the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur on a flight from Shanghai to Melbourne, according to another CNN affiliate, SBS News.
She was found in possession of 1.1 kilos (2.4 lb) of crystal methamphetamine and faced a mandatory death penalty under Malaysia's draconian drugs laws.
Exposto claimed she had no knowledge of the drugs in her bag and had been scammed by a boyfriend she met online.
According to SBS, Exposto's lawyers said she had gone to Shanghai to file documents in relation to her boyfriend's retirement from service in the US army. When she left China, Exposto claimed she was handed …

To cope with his dread, John Kitzhaber opened his leather-bound journal and began to write.
It was a little past 9 on the morning of Nov. 22, 2011. Gary Haugen had dropped his appeals. A Marion County judge had signed the murderer's death warrant, leaving Kitzhaber, a former emergency room doctor, to decide Haugen's fate. The 49-year-old would soon die by lethal injection if the governor didn't intervene.
Kitzhaber was exhausted, having been unable to sleep the night before, but he needed to call the families of Haugen's victims.
"I know my decision will delay the closure they need and deserve," he wrote.
The son of University of Oregon English professors, Kitzhaber began writing each day in his journal in the early 1970s. The practice helped him organize his thoughts and, on that particular morning, gather his courage.
Kitzhaber first dialed the widow of David Polin, an inmate Haugen beat and stabbed to death in 2003 while already serving a life sentence fo…

Concerns about Texas' dwindling lethal injection supplies coupled with questions about the age of the drugs have some advocates wondering whether the state is prepared to humanely carry out its recent uptick in scheduled executions.
Texas currently has 8 death dates and 9 doses of its execution drug - compounded sodium pentobarbital - for use in the Huntsville death chamber. What's more, a string of contradictory records from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice raises questions about whether some of those doses could be 3 years old, far older than previously reported and old enough that experts worry it could increase the chances of a "torturous" execution.
"The older the drug the greater the likelihood of a botched execution. Period," said Maurie Levin, a death penalty lawyer with experience in lethal injection litigation. "It becomes contaminated, corrupted, impotent, and all of those things can lead to a torturous execution."
In response …

Texas executed Juan Castillo, who said he was innocent, for 2003 San Antonio murder
A Texas death row inmate was executed Wednesday — his 4th execution date in a year. Though advocates and his attorneys insisted on Juan Castillo's innocence, he lost all his fights in court and was put to death for a 2003 San Antonio murder.
Juan Castillo was put to death Wednesday evening, ending his death sentence on his 4th execution date within the year.
The 37-year-old was executed for the 2003 robbery and murder of Tommy Garcia Jr. in San Antonio.
The execution had been postponed three times since last May, including a rescheduling because of Hurricane Harvey.
Castillo's advocates and attorneys had insisted on his innocence in Garcia’s murder, pleading unsuccessfully for a last-minute 30-day stay of execution from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott after all of his appeals were rejected in the courts.
The Texas Defender Service, a capital defense group who had recently picked up Castillo’s cas…

DPN opposes the death penalty in all cases, unconditionally, regardless of the method chosen to kill the condemned prisoner. The death penalty is inherently cruel and degrading, an archaic punishment that is incompatible with human dignity. To end the death penalty is to abandon a destructive diversionary and divisive public policy that is not consistent with widely held values. The death penalty not only runs the risk of irrevocable error, it is also costly to the public purse as well as in social and psychological terms.The death penalty has not been proved to have a special deterrent effect. It tends to be applied in a discriminatory way on grounds of race and class. It denies the possibility of reconciliation and rehabilitation. It prolongs the suffering of the murder victim's family and extends that suffering to the loved ones of the condemned prisoner. It diverts resources that could be better used to work against violent crime and assist those affected by it. Death Penalty News is a privately owned, non-profit organization. It is based in Paris, France.Your donations to Death Penalty News DO make a difference.